All posts tagged Sony Walkman

A once-leading hi-tech company with a raft of innovative products now looking decidedly tarnished, competitors stealing market share, a falling stock price, a rudderless board of inward-looking executives mostly from the same country. Sound familiar?

Bloomberg

A visitor browses devices at the Nokia World event in London on Wednesday, as Nokia tries to claw back ground lost to Apple’s iPhone.

While Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia is going through an embarrassingly public spat among its senior executives, it is not the first to look to a foreigner, in this case Canadian Stephen Elop, to dig them out of their hole.

Sir Howard Stringer, the 68-year-old Cardiff born CEO of Sony Corp., was catapulted into the top slot in similar circumstances.

Like Elop, Stringer was the first outsider to take the helm of what had been an inward-looking company dominated by long-serving executives and a cabal of senior mangers who had grown the company together and presided over a rigid corporate culture.

Stringer ousted Sony-veteran Nobuyuki Idei after a troubled 10-year stint at the head of the Japanese electronics giant, which at one point saw the share price plunge 25% in two days, earning Idei the title of “Worst Manager of 2005.”

Although the outgoing Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo never fell that low, his tenure saw a dramatic fall from grace for the once highly esteemed Finnish giant.

And in an eerie echo, Idei’s nemesis was also Apple. Under his tenure, Sony, which can claim to have invented the concept of mobile music with their innovative Walkman, completely missed the threat from Apple’s iPod.

It was the dramatic entry of the Apple’s iPhone, and Nokia’s faltering response in the smartphone market they claim to have invented, that fatally undermined Kallasvuo.